A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view. – Henrik Ibsen
Yesterday I theorized that trafficking fetishists promote the fantasy that all prostitutes are helpless slaves because this belief forms a defense against the uncomfortable truth that women are in control of male sexuality. The recognition that there is a large group of strong, independent, sexually aware women who derive their support from male sexual needs is deeply humiliating to insecure men, so their minds create a fantasy inversion of the truth by insisting, like the Victorians, that women are essentially asexual beings who could not possibly use sexuality to our advantage. But while the Victorians believed that prostitutes were animalistic atavisms, essentially apelike beings in human form, modern “Nordic Model” tyrants and the trafficking extremists who borrow their rhetoric insist that all women are innocent, asexual children who cannot possibly engage in prostitution by choice; they claim that the vast majority of prostitutes are slaves under the control of male “pimps”, and that even demonstrably independent prostitutes are not truly competent and are therefore exploited by their clients. The trafficking fetishist subscribes to an elaborate Gorean fantasy of helpless, enslaved women bought and sold by ruthless pimps and sexually depraved clients; in this fantasy-world men control women’s sexuality, unlike the real world where the exact opposite is true.
Obviously, some slaves are used for prostitution, but as I have pointed out on numerous occasions the fact that slaves are also used for agricultural labor and mining does not mean all farm workers and miners are slaves. A recent news story from Ohio points out the difference between a free prostitute and a sex slave in a rather dramatic fashion; this story is paraphrased from one which appeared on Cincinnati.com:
William Hobert Manis of Hamilton, Ohio is accused of holding a prostitute captive in a closet for 10 days, during which period he raped her 18 times. After she escaped by jumping from an attic window, neighbors summoned police and the 44-year-old Manis was arrested on 18 counts of rape and one of kidnapping and held on $200,000 bond, which his friends are now trying to raise. Mike Hamilton of Milford says Manis’ supporters don’t believe the accusations; “There is no way he could’ve held anybody hostage without us knowing,” he said. He claims that he and others visited Manis’ residence repeatedly throughout the 10-day period of the alleged crimes.
But authorities say evidence backs up the 22-year-old woman’s account of her bizarre confinement – and on Monday (November 29th) she described how Manis kept it secret. As he socialized with friends, Manis kept her bound, gagged and under orders not to shift her position at all – or face consequences. “He would hog-tie me, and tell me not to move. When he came back, if he saw I had changed position at all, he would strip me naked and put me in the attic – and it was as cold in there as it was outside,” she said. “That was my punishment…He would let me out only when he wanted to talk to me, rape me, feed me or bathe me.” Butler County Assistant Prosecutor Jason Phillabaum said that based on the victim’s testimony, police findings and Manis’ criminal record, there is ample evidence to proceed against Manis – and that the case deserves “focused attention and aggressive prosecution.” In 1996-97, Manis served prison time in Ohio for aggravated assault, and some years earlier for nonviolent crimes in North Carolina. In 1992, Hamilton police arrested Manis on four counts of rape and a kidnapping, but that case was dismissed. Manis is linked to the white supremacist group Aryan Nations, Hamilton police said – and his accuser says Manis described his alignment with that group. “He basically told me his whole life story,” she said, including his nickname, “Wild Bill.”
“I don’t think he planned on letting me go, or he wouldn’t have told me so much,” she said. “I think he could have killed me at any time.” She says Manis, whom police said receives disability payments, told her he had been hired to kidnap her and other young women so they could be sold as sex slaves. “He decided he wanted to keep me,” she said. “I think his intention was to keep me as his ‘pet.’”
The young woman met Manis as she worked on East Avenue, prostituting herself to support her drug habit. She said that when Manis walked up to her November 16, he seemed “totally normal”, and the two chatted as they walked to his rented home in the city’s historic district. But soon after arriving Manis turned violent and tried to shove his knit cap into her mouth; though she tried to flee he overtook her, struck her in the head with a pair of handcuffs, then restrained her and bound her mouth with tape. Manis soon noticed she couldn’t breathe, she said, so he removed the tape and replaced it with a rope and sock. He would only remove the gag from her mouth to allow her to drink soda pop and water, then every second day, he would ration out spaghetti, Ramen noodles and chili. While she ate, he spouted off political and social ideology, but she was not allowed to speak; “If I spoke, I got punched.” He made her urinate on herself and would wash her body, she said, to ensure its cleanliness; “He was very obsessed with things being clean,” she said.
She marked the passage of time by watching the daylight which showed through the cracks of the closet door each morning. “I was scared to go to sleep at night because I needed to be aware of what was going on at all times,” she said. “I thought there was a chance he would kill me every day.” She wasn’t sure how she would survive, she just knew she had to because of her two small children. Then on Friday (November 26), she got a chance to escape; in his haste to meet his landlord about a furnace repair, Manis forgot to nail the closet door shut as he usually did. She noticed this, so while he was downstairs she forced the door open, then jumped out a front window two stories to the ground, landing hard on her backside. Still cuffed at both wrists and ankles, she managed to get to her feet and shuffled to the house next door, where the neighbor called the police. “I didn’t care if I was going to be paralyzed by making that jump – I was coming home to my kids,” she said.
It should be pretty obvious to anyone reading this account that the victim was acting independently of male control when she met with Manis, and applied all her efforts to escaping him; it should also be obvious that he chose her as a victim precisely because she WAS a prostitute. And why were charges for the same type of crime dropped in 1992? Care to bet that victim was another streetwalker whom the prosecutor decided was not a “credible witness”? International slavers who trick girls into prostitution generally confine them to brothels in countries other than those in which they were born and prevent escape by threatening their families with reprisals, and since they are “criminals” themselves (prostitutes and illegal aliens both) they dare not go to the even-scarier police for help. Small-time pimps often force addicts into prostitution by threatening to cut off their drug supply; they, too, cannot go to police due to their “illegal” activities (prostitution and drug abuse). In every case, prohibitionist laws ASSIST traffickers and enslavers of women, despite official claims to the contrary.
Yet the trafficking fetishists continue to promote their perverted fantasy, despite the fact that it results in verifiable harm to real women. What kind of unbalanced mind could honestly believe that middle-class escorts, expensive call girls and even independent streetwalkers like the girl in the story could possibly be “trafficked”, coerced or controlled by anyone without clients noticing? Do these fanatics imagine that touring escorts are manipulated from afar via voodoo, or that I carried my “pimp” around in the trunk of my Mercedes and he watched me through concrete walls with x-ray binoculars so he could manipulate my behavior via remote-control to an electrode implanted in my hypothalamus? This stuff isn’t even good science fiction, yet millions of people accept it as fact and dangerous, oppressive public policy is based on the juvenile sexual fantasies of insecure, irrational men and the paranoid delusions of women who are so deeply damaged that they’re willing to believe any outlandish claim about men or sex as long as it’s bad.